Martin Griff / The Times of TrentonThree-year-old Giuseppe Panzittia of Pennington is handed a Red Star hen to hold by John Hart at Rosedale Mills in Hopewell Township on Wednesday. In the background is a portable chicken coop sold by Rosedale Mills which is owned by Hart's family.

And the crowning achievement: on "Live! with Regis & Kelly" on Friday, Kelly Ripa read a few lines from The Wall Street Journal article to guest host Michael Buble. The township, she said, was considering limiting "how often roosters and hens can roll in the hay."

After The Times reported last week on the proposed ordinance — which would limit backyard chicken enthusiasts to 10 days of rooster visits a year and impose other regulations — the Associated Press and Reuters picked up the story and quickly sent it zooming around the world.

John Hart, the agricultural store owner who helped draft the ordinance, joked that The Times should win a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage.

"It’s gone all over the world," he said. "I saw it on four different foreign newspapers already."

Hart, who hosts a Chicken Chat in the spring and fall for people to share ideas about raising poultry, said he’s had 10 to 15 phone calls from reporters to his business, Rosedale Mills.

"I don’t mind, as long as I get a little publicity for the store," he said. "I hope a couple of the reporters come to our Chicken Chat, to find out what all this is about."

Other residents, including Mayor Jim Burd, seemed tickled by the township’s 15 seconds of fame. Burd played along in The Wall Street Journal article, saying, "We’ve been pecking at this for quite some time," and "Don’t egg us on, please."

Ted Borer, whose inquiries about chicken care helped initiate the proposed law, e-mailed links to each new article. "Poultry humor rules," he wrote. He offered two reasons the story attracted so much attention.

"One, with so much bleak news, the world desperately needs something to be amused by right now," he wrote. "Two, talking about chicken sex makes people crack up."

Indeed, Hart noted that it was the recent addition of limitations on rooster’s "conjugal visits" to backyard chicken coops as a way to reduce early morning nuisance crowing that drew attention to a proposal that had been under consideration for three years.

"Now the joke is that people have roosters for rent," he said, laughing.

Committee member Vanessa Sandom said she has heard suggestions for Hopewell Township T-shirts that play off on an alternate term for a rooster.

"There are a lot of versions of T-shirts out there," she said. "Some of them are rather raunchy."
But Sandom said she was also bothered by the focus on a proposal that she described as unnecessary, overreaching and unenforceable.

"It’s just very sad that the way we get ourselves on the map is through this, that the world is introduced to Hopewell Township through this legislation," she said. "Because we do a lot of good things, and they don’t know us for the good stuff."

Sandom said the ordinance was originally hatched out of a mistaken belief that chickens are not considered pets under township law or that chicken owners needed zoning variances. Once that was cleared up, the proposal evolved into an overly detailed animal control ordinance, she argued.

"There are already rules on the books saying if a pet is a nuisance, you deal with it," she said. "You certainly don’t stand there with a stopwatch counting how many minutes or days the rooster has been there."